Vera didn’t answer. She had other things on her mind.
‘Were Ferdinand and Miranda lovers?’ she asked.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Really, I don’t think so. She had a baby by then, and no way was Tony going to be saddled with a child.’
‘Who was the baby’s father?’ Vera looked up at him. His face was round and, for an older man, it was remarkably smooth.
‘Miranda would never say. It was her one big secret. She always implied that it was someone grand in the publishing world, but I never believed that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, my dear, she would never have kept that to herself. I suspected the boy was the result of a rather sordid one-night stand and that was why she refused to speak of it.’
It was clear that Barnes would have been prepared to talk to her for hours, but Vera had an appointment with a woman in HR to keep, and a boring trawl through college records in the hope of finding another connection between Miranda, Ferdinand and any of the other suspects in the case. She drank the rest of her coffee and left.
Later Vera met up with a lad who’d worked with her until he’d got ambition and moved to the Met. They ended up in a pub behind King’s Cross, so she wouldn’t have far to go to get her train at the end of the night. They were drinking brown ale because the man was homesick and she wanted to keep him sweet. At the end of the evening she was a lot more sober than he was. One more bottle and he’d be singing ‘The Blaydon Races’ and applying for a transfer back north.
But the trip to London had provided her with the information she wanted. Hurtling through the night in the carriage with exhausted businessmen and a couple of pissed housewives who’d spent the day Christmas shopping for themselves, she thought she knew what had happened in the Writers’ House. Now, she just had to prove it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Nina Backworth took the Friday of the Writers’ House party as a day off work. She was tempted to throw a sickie, but in the end she played it straight, went to her head of department and explained.
‘Take a day’s compassionate leave,’ he’d said. He was old and tired and counting the days to retirement. He didn’t have to play games with the management. ‘You were there when the woman died, it’s not unreasonable that you’d want to pay your respects at her memorial service.’
Memorial service made Nina think of a cold church and gloomy hymns. Chrissie’s plans for the event were a million miles away from that. The farmhouse had been full of preparations for days. She’d had her mother and a couple of the other women from the WI making floral decorations, great glowing balls of dahlias and chrysanthemums, berries and coloured leaves – very similar, Nina thought, to the flowers that had been in the Writers’ House on the evening of Miranda’s death. The flower arrangements were already loaded in a van hired for the occasion. ‘Alex wants a celebration for his mother,’ Chrissie said. ‘We have to respect that, don’t we?’
Now, sitting in the kitchen at North Farm, Chrissie was as high as a child looking forward to a birthday party. She couldn’t sit still. Nina found the excitement distasteful and wished the evening was over, wished she’d spoken up against it when she’d had the chance.
The present conversation was about clothes. ‘What will you wear, Nina? Not black. Really, darling, I know it’s your statement style, but please don’t wear black tonight. It’s so funereal.’
Nina thought funereal might be appropriate, but to her relief Chrissie broke off to answer her mobile phone and she was saved the need for an immediate answer. It was the producer of the local BBC news programme, confirming that he’d send out a reporter and a cameraman. As soon as the call was over, though, Chrissie persisted. ‘What about that red frock? The one you wore to the launch of the novel. It makes you look stunning.’
‘I can’t wear that dress. I had it on the night Miranda died.’
‘That makes it rather suitable then, doesn’t it?’
‘No!’ Nina thought Chrissie must be mad, wondered if she’d already been drinking. ‘No, really. We’re not trying to re-create that night, are we? You’re not hoping for another murder?’
‘Of course not, darling! This is a party. A celebration.’
Nina thought it was time to move back to her flat in town. She wasn’t made for communal living. This house in the country, with its shared meals and lack of privacy, was already starting to lose its attraction. She longed to be on her own. The possibility of an intruder suddenly seemed less threatening.
Chrissie had arranged for a big taxi to pick up the contributors to the anthology and to take them back at the end of the event. She would have liked them to stay over in the Writers’ House, but Alex had refused to countenance that. He’d insisted that the party should start early in the evening, and that everyone should be away from the place by ten. As if, Chrissie said later to Nina, reporting back on the conversation, he was a sort of male Cinderella and would turn into a pumpkin at the strike of the clock at midnight.
Nina had decided she would take her own car. She felt the need of an escape route. She allowed the van driven by Chrissie’s father, with Chrissie sitting beside him, to drive ahead of her, and was relieved when it disappeared from view and she felt at last that she was alone. She drove slowly, putting off the moment when she’d arrive and be drawn into discussions about canapés and the arrangement of chairs, when she’d have to fix a smile onto her lips and greet the other guests.
She drove down the bank to the house in the last of the sunshine. The house itself was already in shadow and for a moment she was tempted to turn the car round and drive away. Since finding the body on the terrace, the picture of Miranda’s head – her throat slit across – had slipped into Nina’s mind on occasions when she was least expecting it. Now the image returned and, terrified, she brought the car to a stop in the middle of the road. Only the caterers’ van coming down the lane behind her, lights flashing and horn blaring, made her drive on. There was, after all, no turning back. Chrissie hurried out of the house to greet them. She was wearing a gold dress, knee-length, with a tight-fitting bodice and a wide skirt. Over it an apron, so that she looked like a perfect housewife from a 1950s film.
Nina forced herself to focus on the detail. She polished glasses and opened bottles, set copies of the anthology on tables in the entrance hall and drawing room, watched as Chrissie positioned the flowers to best effect. Chrissie was talking a lot, but the words washed over Nina and only occasionally did the woman demand a response. Alex Barton was there too, but distant, as if he’d handed the house and its contents over to Chrissie for the night, as if he was perfectly happy to be an observer. Once Nina looked over and caught his eye. He gave her a look that was at once conspiratorial and dismissive, as if to say, ‘You and I both know how unimportant all this is.’
Soon it was almost dark and Nina felt able to draw the curtains across the drawing-room windows that looked out on the terrace. She’d been itching to do that since they’d arrived. Outside a stray piece of police crime-scene tape, one end trapped beneath the wrought-iron table, blew and twisted in the breeze, like a blue and white kite tail. She shivered slightly, pulled together the velvet drapes and told herself that the terrace could hold no fear for her now.
She’d expected a police presence. Vera Stanhope, big and unmovable, and Joe Ashworth, and perhaps the sharp young woman who’d pretended to befriend her the night Miranda was killed. But there was no sign of them. Perhaps Chrissie had made it clear that they wouldn’t be welcome. The guests began to arrive, hurrying across the cold space from the car park to the house, holding their coats around them, everyone a little tense and brittle, excited to be in this place that had headed up the news for the last couple of weeks.